OMB's drafting a new architecture guide

By Jason Miller

Jan 29, 2004

The Office of Management and Budget will do the General Accounting Office one better on enterprise architectures.

The administration later this year will release a guide and best practices that it and agencies can use to measure how ingrained the systems blueprints are in agencies, OMB chief architect Bob Haycock said.

The guide will differ from GAO's EA Framework, he said. 'GAO's [guide] is more process based and looks at the structure of the agency,' Haycock said. 'We want to look at the actual EA and focus on how it is used.'

Haycock, who spoke yesterday at an enterprise architecture conference sponsored by Compuware Corp. of Detroit, said OMB would use GAO's framework and the new guide it is developing to gauge agencies' progress toward inculcating architectures into their daily operations.

The guide will come out after OMB finishes the final reference model and revises the other four. Haycock said the CIO Council's Enterprise Architecture and Infrastructure subcommittees are reviewing the Data Reference Model, the last of the five EA models that break the Federal EA into layers, and OMB will release it in mid-March for comment.

'We've done a lot of work on the DRM to make sure it links with the other reference models and how to create data exchanges and integration processes,' he said. 'We think we have an approach that will work.'

The Data Reference Model has taken more than a year to complete, longer than the other four reference models combined, Haycock added.

The four revised models and the draft for the final model should be in place for agencies to use for planning their fiscal 2006 budgets, Haycock said.

He said the Business Reference Model will include more detail about lines of business and the Service Component Reference Model will include revised definitions and new components.

'There were a couple of agencies who couldn't find themselves in the BRM,' Haycock said. 'Either they don't understand how to use, it or we are missing something. We will work with those agencies to fix the problems.'

Haycock would not identify the agencies, but said the service to citizen line of business is an area they are focusing on.